50,000 dead Oregon bees to be honored in memorial service

A Portland resident is creating quite the buzz by hosting a memorial ceremony dedicated to the 50,000 bumblebees that died in an Oregon parking lot last week.

Just days before National Pollinator Week, tens of thousands of
bees fell from the trees and were found dead at
a Target parking lot in Wilsonville, Ore. A state investigation
found that an insecticide coined “Safari” was to blame, and
Oregon now has a 180-day ban of 18 pesticides containing the
chemical dinotefuran.

More than 50 poisoned European linden trees have been covered
with netting to prevent further bee deaths, and the Oregon State
Agricultural Department is still investigating whether or not
there was a violation of state or federal pesticide laws.

Meanwhile, Portland resident Rozzell Medina is hosting a memorial
to commemorate the bumblebees. The July 30 event
will take place in the Target parking lot to “memorialize
these fallen lifeforms and talk about the plight of the bees and
their importance to life on Earth,” Medina wrote on the
event’s Facebook page. There will be food available for
attendees.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity for people to see
that this is not just a news item,” Medina told The
Oregonian. “With a lot of these ecological catastrophes, they
become so abstract that people become scared to feel them.”

The number of bee deaths marks the world’s largest recorded mass
die-off of bumblebees. Scientists intiailly estimated that 25,000
bees died in Wilsonville, but that figure doubled after a more
accurate assessment, executive director of the Xerces Society
Scott Hoffman Black told the Los Angeles Times.

Last week, a second, but smaller mass die-off occurred in
Hillsboro, Ore. City officials estimated that at least 100 bees
died beneath a linden tree in the downtown area. Investigators
linked the Safari insecticide to both the Hillsboro and the
Wilsonville die-offs.

Bees are crucial pollinators, and their decline is posing a
dangerous threat to the US agriculture industry. The honeybee
population has suffered
annual death rates of 30 percent, and about 10 million bee hives
have been lost since 2006. The US Department of Agriculture coins
this phenomenon the Colony Collapse Disorder, and has warned that
the US may not be able to meet its pollination demands to sustain
its homegrown crops this year.

Medina, who earned his master’s in leadership and sustainability
education from Portland State University, believes that Americans
need to understand what the bee deaths mean in the long run,
particularly for the agriculture industry.

“This isn’t a funeral,” he told the LA Times.
“We’re not there to bury the bees or build little bee
coffins. We’re going there to talk about what this means.”